Future of this package with the future release of dbt 1.8

[NicolasGuary]

Hey team !
I think you already know but dbt planned to release built-in unit testing feature in dbt 1.8 (dbt-labs/dbt-core#8275).
What's your opinion on this? Will you try to merge this package with their implementation, or simply encourage users to migrate to their implementation ?

[okivlo]

Heya, I was wondering the same thing.

[cdiniz]

Hi all,
I haven't tried the beta version yet, but after reading the docs I believe it's going in the right direction.
I liked their current proposal. Slightly different from our approach, but not bad at all.

I think there are a lot of advantages in using something that is inside dbt-core, well maintained by people that have proper time for it, etc. From a technical standpoint, there are also advantages in developing this inside core - in our journey, we found many times situations where we thought how easy it should have been.

Then I would say that our package will become obsolete, and I'm glad about that! It means we have a better way to unit-test our data (🤞 )

[brabster]

Hey, I'll throw a potential problem in here - I've found that this package can actually be used to test chunks of a pipeline by mocking out upstream models or sources, then asserting about a model several steps downstream. That was a game-changer in a recent piece of work where we were able to effectively define really meaningful acceptance tests like "when this happens in the source systems, then that is produced by our pipeline"

From my limited reading of the dbt native unit tests, they're limited to mocking and asserting a single model, so wouldn't support this kind of use?

[okivlo]

Yeah, we have noticed this behavior too. Right now we are still using this package as a form of e2e testing. Over at dbt-labs they already confirmed that they are not going to implement this in the unit-testing update. (dbt-labs/dbt-core#8275)